Farayn: The Grammancer
by Tes-thesula
Summary: A story or backstory about a dunmer diviner experiencing the Soulburst in the lead up to the events of the Elder Scrolls Online. It does not go well for him.


The house of an arcanist. A dunmer house of a certain style, it swells underground, stairs leading downwards to the home. Shelves line the walls, heavy with books and scrolls and drawers. The ground above is peppered with chimneys and below is why. Here an alchemical laboratory, quiet now, but bright with irregular colours. There a furnace, hot and hungry. Comfortable seats, guests cannot complain.

'Put the your gold on the table if you please. Just there will do. Somewhere we can both see it. Wouldn't want you to think me a charlatan disappearing your gold and giving you back beans. Ha ha!

'Yes yes, I prefer it that way! I do not want an endless stream of people knocking at my door, with their banal and empty requests. Much better my name comes to the ears of those who really need it, who bring me such delicious and deep secrets. People like you madam.

'Ah! No, I quite understand. You stand at the edge of a great plunge and want reassurances that I have not laden the bay with knife sharp rocks. What I do is an obscure art, a study of language and magic. Better than asking the dead, who have more pressing worries on their minds. Better than looking in the guts of birds, unless you are keen on updrafts and shrews.''

The dunmer shuffled around the room, preparing as he lectured. He moved like an old man, even though he was not, heavy robes muffling his motions, weighing at his spine. His scalp was razor-scraped to a fuzz while his jaw was thickly covered in a beard. He fussed with a black candle and motioned expressively with nimble long fingers.

'Think of a babe, squawling and new. It's mind absorbs language like a sponge absorbs water. Schlep! All sucked in, big eyes watching your every move. Uncanny little bastards one and all. But the point! The point is, madam, that we feed them morsels of vocabulary and grammar with our speech and from those morsels they can construct an infinity of possible arrangements!'

The dunmer flashes his palms like a magician revealing a trick, red eyes bright and wide. The lack of reaction tempers his enthusiasm somewhat and he hunches back over his preparations.

'Yes, well. There is a truth in that you see. For where does this infinity reside? In the brain of the child? Pfah, they are empty wells for throwing knowledge in, you won't find anything worth excavating there. So what does that leave? The words! The language! Within each sentence lies the potential for every other - an infinite configuration of sensible constructions! Now, most of these will be fictions or functionally useless, but some… some will be true and some will be secret.

'Do you have your question?'

He stood posed, his hand outstretched as the woman hesitated. But only for a heartbeat. He took the scrap of parchment and unfolded it, leaning in like a person whose eyes have betrayed him.

'A where! Everyone seeking things misplaced or people misbeen. Very well phrased this question, yes, you have been informed by someone who knows my ways. The name, the possible places, good, very good. It is easier to rearrange into an answer than to pluck it unformed from rules and letters.'

He shot the hard woman a stern look.

'But you must have heard the price. I am delving into a prince's realm with this magic and the Lord Mora is a jealous and miserly hoarder. He will not give up the merest scrap without recompense. You have brought it?'

Again, his hand crossed the gulf between them. This pause was longer. For a different sort of person she would be handing him the keys to a fortune perhaps, or swift passage to the next world. But this dunmer had a reputation - the information that came to him, stayed with him. A dam in the flow, or better, a bottomless crevasse. She passed across another slip of parchment and he devoured it greedily.

But the smile on his face wilted. His eyes flicked from the neat writing to the woman's face, which was cast harder and less compassionate than the metal faces that remained of the Dwemer.

'...I see. This is… quite the secret. Too often people bring me little things, weighed heavily on the scales of their own shame but as nothing to the Lord of the Hidden Word. "My brother's face comes to me when I abuse myself." Wah. "I can only get hard when whipped." Who cares? Fuck your dog if it pleases you. But this? This is gold for rough weave indeed madam. I foresee no problems, no problems at all.'

* * *

The dunmer sat at his worktable, a sheet of fresh vellum in front of him. It was all part of the ritual - the candle, its wax stained black by ink, the vellum from a calf stolen from its mother before she could see it, the question and the secret laid in front of him.

First came the scribing. He had, over his years, experimented with different frameworks. In the beginning he had used the cast - chips of blackmailer's bones carved with letters, thrown onto the blank pages of a book. Haphazard and dripping with cheap superstition. Then the grid. The question arranged into a square of letters, the answer picked from it like a word game. Neat, but unsophisticated. His latest and most satisfying method was what he called the dials. Carefully, in his neat ornate script - not in the daedric tongue as some presumed, but common Dunmeri - he wrote out the question in interlocking circles. The ink sizzled quietly as it dried, an alchemical agent that burned itself onto the vellum, as much a tattoo as anything.

His guest was well-mannered for all that her secret had unnerved him. The writing took much time but she did not speak or fidget. Some of his clients would peer over his shoulder as he worked, breathing like hogs making things twice as troublesome. She might as well have been dead for all the curiosity she displayed.

He blew on the vellum, leaning back to admire his handiwork. He likened it to an elaborate lock on a safe. The question unlocked the door that hid the answer within. He set down his quill and with a point, lit the black candle, then unfurled his graceful fingers, placing them on the letters. He let out a breath and summoned his power.

The letters began to glow green, lit from a place deep below. He looked at them and turned them, the letters clicking into new configurations like gears. They held their own teleological pressure, turning loosely when wrong and clicking into the correct positions, stiff to move. He was outlining something existent, chipping away the falseness. The answer to the question wanted to be known. It took a sensitive touch, a lightness and expertise, guiding and being be guided. He could feel the ache at the back of his eyes, a painful strain as he tried to look at once at Nirn and also through it, to the Apocrypha. It _hurt_ the eyes so, to see into two places at the same time.

The last letter fell into place, he felt it with his finger tips. Carefully he removed his hands and blindly reached for the client's secret, getting ready to burn it on the candle. The catalyst that would click open the answer from the question.

But something happened, a wrench, a twist. A pulse of puissance that gouged out his eyes and tugged the optic nerve taut.

The fire on the candle blazed, his power bleeding wildly from him, out of the control of his knowledge. He did not know if he conjured the elemental from it, or if it rode the wave of the event, but whatever the case, the flame leapt from wick to his shelves, igniting his books.

He could not see. He could see everything. Pages flashed before his eyes, in languages he did not know but could still somehow understand. He gabbled.

'Rutgar stole the gems from his father's house before he died, so that they would not go to his brother.'

A gust of wind blew his table over, splattering his client with ink. By now she was terribly alarmed, a blackened dagger appearing in her hand. The flames spread, eating away his words, his gathered knowledge. The book he was writing on his own discoveries was consumed, secreted away in ash and smoke.

"She hates him so much, though she smiles so sweetly for him. She would kill him if she knew she could keep her freedom. She prays nightly for his death."

That one in Ta'agra. The world opened her hidden places to him and his pulled taut eyes, seeing things in colours he did not know existed. All that had been hoarded was displayed to him, and for a brief unclouded moment he saw the truth of things that plagued the sages for millenia. His mouth ran incessantly, plucking secret after secret from the Apocrypha, spending them recklessly. He could not stop himself, he was puppet in the hand of a careless master, his body tugged towards its breaking. He could hear the creak of his bones, the tearing of ligaments and vessels. The loops of his brain were being uncoiled. His teeth clattered together, jabbering sounds more than speaking words.

'Hermaeus Mora fears-'

His mouth was snapped shut, slicing off the tip of his tongue, the bowl of his mouth filling with hot copper blood. The gush of knowledge was squeezed off and his eyes shoved back into his skull. A shadow fell across the no-place of magic and mind. A heavy presence that froze the flame in their licking hunger and the wind in its mad dance. In that still stolen moment, his client stood, her pupils split each into two and when her mouth levered open, her tongue transformed into a nest of oily tentacles.

'Thief. Pillager and plunderer.' The daedric prince did not bother with words spoken on the air. He hammered the knowing of them hard into his mind.

'You take without payment, bargain with an empty hand.'

The tentacles stretched out to caress his head, soft as a lover's touch.

'I should claim you for myself, drag you into my realm and unravel you, see what stories are written on the insides of your bowels.'

He squirmed, tried to speak or magick or anything. But he was held fast, pinned by that dread gaze.

'But your knowings are feeble and insignificant - no compensation for the jewels you have ripped from my house. I would gain myself a plaything for a time… but those are cheap and plentiful.'

The hollow voice flexed along with the tentacles, pushing through his skull into his brain. They pushed along the pathways of his thoughts, held him as securely as any chains.

'You are mine dunmer. The day you die I shall pull you screaming into my house, make you my project until you are a gibbering nothingness for the rest of time. You are marked and you are mine.'

The pain intensified, searing daggers pressed into his best and most beautiful memories.

'Unless… go into the world. Find me a secret great enough to balance your debt and you shall be freed.'

He wriggled in his cage of pain, desperately nodding. Anything anything at all. He would smear himself in shit and crawl through broken glass to be free. The presence, the manifestation of the prince smiles gruesomely, the client's mouth torn open at the seams to fit the tentacles.

'For now… I will hold something of yours as a guarantee. It will be returned when the price is paid in full.'

The tentacles withdraw, but as they leave they tug something with them, leave a raw wound in his mind and memory, a place where something important sat. He is dropped to the floor, the sudden absence of the mental pain leaving him confused. The knowledge… it was so fundamental to him that it cannot be placed with any ease. Hermaeus Mora departs his home, dropping his client like a suit of empty clothes. Everything snaps back, the frozen moment thaws and the heat of the flames rushes in, whipped to a frenzy by an ecstatic wind.

* * *

He is free but he has to survive. Gods do not give. He drags his client out of his burning house, pulling her up the stairs with aching bruised muscles and muttering with a bleeding tongue. All he has saved is the pouch of gold she has brought him. His house and all his belongings burn.

The client he leaves at a safe distance. She has been sorely used, her face torn open and her mind no doubt ravaged. Whether she will wake up herself he does not know, but he does not want to be there for that. He has read her secret. She will not be forgiving.

And he has work to do.

* * *

Later, he discovers that he has lived through the Soulburst. Others have been more lucky than him, many have been less. A world has been marked like he has been marked.

But before that he learns what has been hidden from him. A new acquaintance on the road, asking him the easiest question of them all:

'Your name muthsera?'

Groping at nothing, smooth polished silence where once a mother's praise and a lover's whisper. Just a couple of words to mean all that a man was, but it is a prize greater perhaps, than the threat of torment laid on him by the prince. Worth any price.


End file.
